


Disambiguation

by Maerhys



Category: Say Goodbye - Lisa Gardner, The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2018-05-12 00:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5646838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maerhys/pseuds/Maerhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Most families are as sick as their secrets but the Joneses stay sweet on theirs. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disambiguation

Jason is all too aware that Sandy knows more than she's admitted. Even in their newfound closeness, Sandy has her secrets and he has his, and this specific open secret works for them. They don't talk about those three days that she was gone, mostly for Ree's sake, but also because Jason thinks she enjoys the idea of plausible deniability as much as he does.

-

Sandy finishes out the school year without speaking to Ethan but Jason senses that his wife has made peace with the boy genius. They can't trust him without amends and he holds a part of their peace. Amends have been made. Somehow. Jason knows better than to ask for details.

When Ree and he pick Sandy up from the middle school on the last day of school, she politely says good-bye and good luck to the milling students and loose knots of teachers clutching at their overflowing tote bags. Jason catches a glimpse of Ethan from the corner of his eyes, mostly because it's a little hard not to with that brass-colored hair. Ethan gives Sandy a shy wave that is stiff from wrist to fingertip.

Ree babbles on about the three different kinds of ice cream she's going to get on family vacation tomorrow. Jason knows they can crest the highways into downtown Boston without worrying about Ethan giving up the hard drive to that cop who's so intent on arresting someone that he's surprised that she has not ordered one of the corpses dug up just so that she can bury someone herself. Well, as sure as he can be.

Sandy throws herself into the front seat beside him, tosses her canvas bags at her feet, and leans over to kiss him lightly on the cheek. They do this now and Ree claps with delight and begins that damned kissing in a tree song that Mimi taught her for jump roping. Jason smiles casually, letting the feel of her lips on his skin linger for a moment before the heat travels down his neck.

-

They spend a sweltering week in Boston and the city is dead from the heat; anyone who does vacation has already headed north into Maine or down to the Jersey shore on the midnight express.

Ree is ecstatic about the lack of waiting her turn in this dead town. Sandy reminds her that when the baby comes, Ree will have a little brother or sister to wait for, a little one who won't move or think as fast as Ree. Sandy can't help but giggle when her daughter becomes overly serious about learning how to be the best big sister in the world.

She glances at Joshua (that's what she calls him in her head and wishes he'd allow her to use it aloud) and wonders if he is thinking of Janie now. In those three days that they don't talk about and the weeks of entropy and stillness that followed, Sandy had utilized what Ethan taught her about computers at internet cafés when she stopped in for a coffee, and she even took the chance at the school computers to sift through the newspaper archives. Sandy knows all of the names from his past and that excites her more than his mysterious older man routine ever did.

-

Jason will never ask Sandy if she knows that he knows that she's only nineteen now. He doesn't like to think about how old she was on the day that they ran away together.

Of course, he's always known her age because he's always known exactly who she is even if Sandy won't ever hazard so much as a guess now that Maxwell Black is dead with all of those Southern family secrets moldering inside of him. Sandy will never know that she was born in a women's prison ward, with her first father already several months dead.

Jason was young when he started looking for her, before she was born, before he dreamed up what he'd do when he found her. He'd been a boy then. He hears the word boy on Maxwell's lips, a slippery sneer drawing the syllable out until Jason thought it might be the — but no. They're both dead rot now, meat for the bugs that would soon be caught by the spiders.

-

Sandy will never ask why Joshua decided on Jones when there are a million other last names out there to chose from that don't sound so fraudulent.

Names that don't link him to someone from that year. She can't figure out why he'd take Virginia's name instead of Rita's, or why not the FBI agent who'd saved him? No. That's not true, Joshua saved himself and then he had saved her. Somewhere along the line she'd saved both of them from her own bad choices.

But that name bothers her, and Sandy thinks she may have answered her own question. Maybe Virginia meant something to him? The official reports are sketchy: Virginia "Ginny" Jones had served the entire two years in prison but not before she'd given birth to a baby in the county jail. Vital statistics are nowhere to be found. Father unknown. Lucky baby, Sandy thinks and shakes her blond hair into her face. Lucky, lucky baby.

-

Sandy cannot even guess how that luck was earned.

-

In the evenings when they lie together across the spacious green quilt and hold hands, she aches to tell him that the dates are out there for anyone to find and she can add and subtract with the best of her sixth graders. Maybe he believes that twenty-five years into the future from that year will see him healed, but she can't blame him for the lie no matter why he continues to tell it. Joshua's not the only one to lie about his age. They're both older than any two people in their twenties should be but that's the high cost of their formerly low lives.

-

Before the baby arrives, Jason panics and finds himself in the attic crawl-space huddled under the eave where their new emergency kit is stored. He touches the cold metal, the heavy lock, and calms. Today he thinks of Aaron, or actually Aaron was Randy, but the teenager is always Aaron to Jason. He can picture Aaron with Scott; he is able to distance himself from the scene when he thinks of the boy in the memory as Scott. Only Scott, never Joshua.

Jason had read Kimberly Quincy's report from the night that Aaron had blown his head off in front of her. He still wishes he'd been there, maybe so that he could have pulled the trigger. Aaron had never been the Burgerman but he'd been a Burgerman. Agent Quincy's retelling of Aaron's last words about never wanting to be left alone with the baby, that Aaron would destroy the child, that Ginny and he and the baby couldn't have a family after all that Aaron had done, it loops like a tape reel on repeat in Jason's head. Ree was a blessed event that he'd counted on to complete their family. Ree was his graduation. This baby, Jesus Christ, this baby is his blood and Sandy's blood — he's terrified that the blood may still matter, even after all of these years.

-

Joshua's different with this pregnancy and Sandy wonders if it is because they're having a boy or because this time the baby is Ferris stock. It must be the latter. Sandy knows her husband and he's not a monster; he will never be Vincent Martignetti or Randy Cooper or one of the slick-suited monsters he fleeces on the internet. Joshua abhors what these men do to children. He touches Ree with love, her with love but rarely desire. She sees that he still lives in that old moldy house in North Georgia more days than not. Just as she lives in that poisoned garage, glass in her stomach, eyes full of her mother's broken and bloody fingertips.

After Ree's in bed, she tucks herself beneath the sheets and waits for Joshua to get home from the paper. If she has printed copies of the various police and parole officer reports that she reads with a flashlight in the hour before he comes home, well, that's her business.

-

D.D. gets the call from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children almost a year after the Jones case is unofficially off of her rotation. The clerk apologizes profusely and she decides not to rip him a new asshole because he's probably a first year intern without a tool in his box to deal with all the shit heaped on him each day. She takes cursory notes as he drones on about running the photo of Jason Jones through the directory of known and suspected perpetrators and there wasn't a match. D.D. nods her head to the metronome of the kid's voice.

She is about to cut the call short when she hears the intern breathe like he's having an asthma attack. He confesses that the photo got mixed into another stack earmarked to be run through another data bases. Her dumbfounded silence must give enough indication for him to repeat himself. D.D. lets his words wash over her and slowly all of the pieces slide into place.

Jason Jones' photo was run through the data base of known child victims. Victims. D.D. shakes her head and hangs up the phone. She'll call her contact tomorrow to get the whole story from someone with more security clearance. She's still thinking of Jones and his dead eyes when she pulls into the faux country restaurant's parking lot and makes a beeline for the carving station at the buffet.

-

The baby arrives but they don't have a name for him when Sandy is discharged two days later. Ree lobbies for Rex because it's the name of Mimi's new Labradoodle but Sandy vetoes it before Jason has a chance to laugh at their daughter's antics. Jason loves his nameless son as much as he did Ree, as much as he does love Ree. It's a different love he realizes as he traces the fine downy skin with the back of his finger and looks for a feature handed down from farther up Sandy's family tree. If he sees the blood of the maternal grandparents in his son, Jason doesn't process the parts but focuses on the wholeness of his family.

He remembers his parents with their tight white lines of lips and fearful eyes when he played with Janie after he'd come home, and how he knew that he should never have had a family to come back to. Sandy changed all of that when she finally noticed him at that bar. The bar he'd sat in night after night waiting for her to come in, waiting for her to sidle up beside him and take him back to the start.

Sandy has never realized that he's always been waiting for her to show up.

Ree ends up naming the baby Andy (although Sandy writes in Andrew on the birth certificate paperwork) after the old Raggedy Andy doll she finds in the back of her closet. In a show of big sister love, she passes Lil Bunny down to Andy, along with her nightlight, and takes Raggedy Andy to her bed, much to Mr. Smith's annoyance.

-

Jason arrives home and parks behind an unmarked sedan and a bead of sweat pops up at his temple. It's March in Southie, still an inch of snow on the ground but his truck feels like the Mojave at high noon. He grabs his laptop bag and slowly makes his way into the house. He's home early from his even earlier day shift. Sandy is home with Andy but Ree is gone to all-day kindergarten. Mr. Smith is lazing in the front window, licking his forepaws methodically.

Jason finds Sergeant Warren at the table with Sandy where they stare at each other over mugs of steaming coffee but neither speak. He goes through the motions: pours himself a coffee into his #1 Dad mug, tosses his overcoat onto the coat peg near the kitchen door, sits next to his wife so he too can stare at the detective in silence.

The sergeant offers him an eerie smile and says, "Your computer was found, Mr. Jones. In a dump off the eastside, but it was badly damaged, of no use to us. BRIC tells me that the thing was all but incinerated. This officially closes your case file." Her face is a smooth mask, but Jason sees that she knows something, maybe not all of it, but a piece that she's latched on to and his past offers her forgiveness.

"Okay," he says, waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of her arresting him for something that was found on the hard drive — that damned photo of Scott with the tarantula. Incinerated? Jason doubts it. He continues to look just past her shoulder at the photo of Ree and Andy on the refrigerator as the silent pause becomes a measure of quiet engulfing the kitchen.

"That's all," Warren says as she collects her wool peacoat and slips out the front door.

Sandy stands to lock the door and starts to ask Jason a question just as he shakes his head.

"She knows," he says. "Somehow she knows who I am and this is, fuck if I know what this is." He grimaces, a hundred ways that Warren could have found out tick-tock around in his head.

He lets his wife encircle her arms around his waist and they stand in that tableau until the telephone rings and a telemarketer offers them a better long distance plan.

-

Sandy slowly realizes that it is all a nightmare: Maxwell climbing the stairs and finding her in the closet, coming to take her away from Joshua and subject Ree to his hell house that smells of decaying roses.

Waking, Jason murmurs her name in his sleep and moves in close so that their bodies slink around each other to gather heat and comfort.

"Dreaming about my father. He was the devil himself," she says, focusing on scrubbing the old man's face from her mind.

Jason stiffens slightly, thinking of a different father for Sandy, but relaxes immediately, and touches the starburst scar on his chest from Maxwell's bullet. "Yeah, he was. The devil we knew, but he's gone now. He can't hurt you again. He'll never get to Ree or Andy."

She nods, reveling in her selfish thought that he finally loves her enough now. Joshua loves Sandy not just Ree and Andy's mother. He's giving up his secrets more easily now; he's letting her into the dark corners where the spiders spin.

-

Years later, Jason finds the obituary he's looked been searching out for most of his life. He clips it from the small town paper and slips it into his computer bag. When Sandy is asleep, he will scan the inch-long column into his online scrapbook that doesn't leave a trace on the old Dell they still use as a family computer. Virginia Jones, dead and so many days later than he'd hoped for.

The obituary is sure to mention that Jones is survived by a daughter. As was Burgerman, although unknown at the time his obituary was printed.

Jason has made sure that Sandy is there to survive them. He's all too aware that Sandy will never know his most tightly woven secret: Joshua will always need her more than Jason ever did.


End file.
